Thought Leadership

Why We Eliminated Our Buyer Fees

November 2, 2017

By Michael G Barrett, President & CEO

We want to make every dollar, pound, euro, etc. that buyers spend on Rubicon Project go further than it does on competing exchanges. That’s why on November 1, 2017, we eliminated our buyer fees across the entire platform.

We did this for a few reasons. First, because a more efficient marketplace benefits everyone. Recent internal testing convinced us that removing buyer fees doesn’t just help buyers meet their performance objectives, but it encourages them to bid more actively and competitively, resulting in higher revenues for sellers. The second reason is that the dynamics in this industry are changing quickly. Though charging buyer fees made sense for us at one time, that tide began to turn with the rise of header bidding, and we want to stay ahead of it and retain our competitiveness. Last but not least, it ties directly to the commitment I made when I joined the company earlier this year to normalize our pricing and bring a higher level of transparency to everything we do.

On a practical level, this change means that we are no longer charging fees to buyers anywhere on our platform, including through header bidding or waterfall transactions. As a side note, we have never charged buyer fees through our Orders technology, including private marketplaces (PMPs) and guaranteed orders (GO), so that remains unchanged.

This move to simplify our pricing model is the latest in a series of efforts to deliver value, transparency and control to our buyers and sellers. Moving ahead, we will continue to evolve our business and we look forward to providing further updates in the near future.